The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (7 page)

She meant it facetiously, but maybe she was right, because if there was any figure in the history of American fiction who, through his writing, created a literary declaration of independence, it was Mark Twain. He was the first to deliberately cut himself off from the prevailing traditions of the mother tongue. With
Huck Finn
he helped forge a new national myth, giving us a hero who looked and spoke like one of the tramp protagonists of the European novel, but whose values and principles were more akin to those of the great epic heroes.

Huck was a mongrel, an outcast, uneducated and unmoored, and since his creation countless Americans have recast themselves in his image. He was suspicious of the smothery ways of conventional society, but in his ideals, his moral courage, his determination to open himself up to the lessons of nature and the vagaries of experience, he was as much a product of the Enlightenment as were George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, or so I came to think when I followed Farah’s advice and began reading more American history.

In some respect, Mark Twain started with the same basic premise as the founding fathers: he saw himself participating in a wholly new enterprise, trying to actualize the ideals of democracy culled from Greece and Rome. In doing so, like Adam, he could not help but commit the ultimate sin against his creators: declaring independence. There are wonderful stories about Twain’s disdain for Europe, its aristocracy and vanity. He compared Venice to Arkansas and mocked Europe’s preoccupation with its cultural heritage, but if, unlike his more established peers Henry James, William Dean Howells and James Fenimore Cooper, he did not fawn on Europe, he had far more knowledge and appreciation for the land of his ancestors than he let on. Nor was he ignorant of European culture: he appreciated Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac and Tocqueville; his favorite character was Joan of Arc, and he passionately hated some of Europe’s most popular novelists, like Sir Walter Scott and (alas) Jane Austen.

Twain himself was much appreciated in Europe. He traveled extensively around the Continent and even lived in Italy for ten years. He was feted by European royalty and by his peers, including a young Rudyard Kipling, but he never sought to compete with European writers on their own terms. The question that seemed to animate him was how to articulate the new reality back home, the distinct new American identity—how to give America its own voice. He could be critical of the affectations of his fellow countrymen, as he was in
The Innocents Abroad
of the ignorant but arrogant type he came across at a restaurant in Marseille, loudly telling everyone how great it was to drink wine with dinner while boasting that
he was a “free-born sovereign, sir, and American, sir, and I want everybody to know it!” (That person, whose arrogance stems from his ignorance, is alive and well in America today, still ranting and raving against “old Europe.”)

I had decided to teach a new class on American fiction the following semester. I wanted to start with Huck and to ask my students to consider what it means to write a great American novel. Can one really speak of
American
fiction? I had become obsessed with Eudora Welty’s claim that art “is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.”

It is easy to talk about the break with Europe; that aspect is obvious. America, among Britain’s colonies, would become the black sheep of the family, rebellious and unruly. When it chose to cut away from its parents, it had to negate everything about them, but then it was also a direct heir to the traditions and culture of the “old country.” How could one remain true to those traditions and at the same time radically subvert them? One can see this tension in the works of Twain’s giant elder brothers, Hawthorne, Melville, and even Poe. But that is really not Huck’s concern. In creating
Huckleberry Finn,
Twain distanced himself not only from Europe but from those who founded America, the Pilgrims. He started from scratch and conjured a character as yet unborn, one whose language had been alien to fiction until then.

This was the main thrust of the lecture I was preparing on that gray, gloomy day, when, sitting on the couch with my notes on my knees, a cigar that I never smoked dangling from my lips to assuage a nervous tension I had whenever I wrote, pen in one hand and phone in the other, Farah called me on her cell. She was at the clinic around the corner from my house, one of those healing centers that offers alternative remedies when more conventional doctors no longer know what to do. She wanted to talk during the long hour she spent taking her vitamin C cure.

“Huck Finn predicted America,” I told her. “He predicted—or at least laid the groundwork for—the two of us talking and arguing simultaneously in two languages in this city called Washington, D.C.”

Farah would have none of it. Ever the pragmatist, she pointed out that Huck wouldn’t have been much interested in the musings of two middle-aged Iranian women in Washington, D.C. But I wouldn’t be so easily dissuaded. I decided, since she wanted to talk, that I would give her a preview of the first lecture of my new class. For some time now, she had been my most committed student, though I often felt that she had more to teach me than vice versa.

I wanted to begin with something that would jolt the class from its usual docile torpor. For a while I entertained the idea of having them all read an outrageous, dazzlingly confected speech that Twain delivered in 1881 to the New England Society of Philadelphia on the anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing on Plymouth Rock. Here, as in most of his essays and speeches, he sallies forth with humor, but underneath the pretense of comedy is a message that is dead serious.

Speaking to descendants of the
Mayflower,
he begins by asking his audience why they would wish to celebrate “those ancestors of yours of 1620—the
Mayflower
tribe,” whom he describes as a “hard lot” who “took good care of themselves, but they abolished everybody else’s ancestors.” Twain differentiates himself from his hosts, telling them, “I am a border ruffian from the state of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. I have the morals of Missouri and the culture of Connecticut, and that’s the combination that makes the perfect man.” Then he goes on to say, “But where are my ancestors? Whom shall I celebrate? Where shall I celebrate? Where shall I find the raw material?”

Identifying with those “abolished” ancestors, he assumes the identity of America’s persecuted underdogs and says his first American ancestor was “an early Indian.” “Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. Not one drop of my blood flows in that Indian’s veins today. I stand here, lone and forlorn, without an ancestor.” Next he calls himself a Quaker. “Your tribe,” he says, “chased them out of the country for their religion’s sake. . . . [They] broke forever the chains of political slavery, and gave the vote to every man in this wide land, excluding none!—none except those who did not belong to the orthodox church.” Then he invokes the Salem witches and, finally, the most persecuted and marginalized of all, the black slave: “The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your progenitors was an ancestor of mine—for I am of a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel. I am not one of your sham meerschaums that you can color in a week.”

It was his recognition of this mongrel quality in the American identity—earlier expressed by Whitman in
Leaves of Grass
when he says, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)”—that enabled Twain to create an epic of the first American rogue. Many great writers of literature challenge and tackle conformity, but he made it a national characteristic to be always new, to start as if there had been no precedent. He found a verbal equivalent to the language of jazz, that other very American, exquisitely mongrel form of imaginative expression.

After Twain, it becomes difficult to talk about America without acknowledging those absent ancestors, conveniently airbrushed out of the preferred mythology of America’s glorious origins. Twain’s heresy in
Huckleberry Finn
was no longer against the original fatherland, Britain—or, in a larger context, Europe—but against this new and in a sense more menacing “father,” the “
Mayflower
tribe.” He became the epic narrator of this challenge, a theme that from then on was picked up and articulated in many different forms in the great works of American fiction.

“Hear your true friend—your only true friend—listen to his voice.”
Tongue in cheek but also dead serious, he tells the
Mayflower
grandees in Philadelphia: “Disband these societies, hotbeds of vice, of moral decay—perpetuators of ancestral superstition. . . . I beseech you, I implore you, in the name of your anxious friends, in the name of your suffering families, in the name of your impending widows and orphans, stop ere it be too late. Disband these New England societies, renounce these soul-blistering saturnalia, cease from varnishing the rusty reputations of your long-vanished ancestors, the super-high-moral old ironclads of Cape Cod, the pious buccaneers of Plymouth Rock—go home, and try to learn to behave!”

Twain’s most effective act of heresy was a literary declaration of independence from all previous forms of fiction, even those he revered. In most of his work, but most perfectly in
Huckleberry Finn,
he set out to give shape and voice to this mongrel, who was not just on the margins of society but without a space within its literary orbit. This is what fates Huck to be seemingly unable to fully articulate his own story, and why others, in fact far less articulate, constantly try to impose their own stories on him, reforming Huck and enslaving Jim. Unlike our modern-day “rogues” who are such masters of self-promotion, Huck and Jim are representative of their nation exactly because they are the least represented.

I was impatiently waiting for Farah at the coffee shop of the Phillips Collection, one of my hidden lairs, where I worked and rewarded myself by wandering around the museum at intervals and gazing at my favorite paintings. I had underlined a quote from Twain’s journal, knowing that this was to be the focus not just of my chapter on Twain but of the whole book. I was living in the deceptively liberating period after finishing a book and handing the galleys to the publisher. I had already started thinking and talking about the main themes for my new book, as well as planning the course for next term, which was to start with
Huck Finn.
I kept feeling that I was on the verge of a new discovery, but not quite there. I hoped talking to Farah would help clarify things for me.

When Farah arrived, after we bought our drinks and settled on a table situated under a portrait of Duncan Phillips and his wife, I pushed toward her my summary of my
Huck
chapter: “Reading his story, we slowly discover three things: (1) Huck’s adventures, like Edward Hopper’s paintings, are variations on the theme of aloneness. (2) These adventures, although filled with great humor, are not that of a young, restless boy searching for fun and diversion, or a nineteenth-century version of Holden Caulfield rebelling against the shoddy grown-up world, but that of a lonesome boy running for his life. (3) The whole story is shaped around one central theme, best articulated by Mark Twain in a notebook entry of 1895, in which he describes
Huck Finn
as ‘a book of mine where a sound heart & a deformed conscience come into collision & conscience suffers defeat.’”

I was excited like a child and almost felt like saying, “How cool is that?!”

I felt I had found the secret, the source of Huck’s rebellion, his individuality, his morality. One of Twain’s greatest contributions was to transform the seat of morality from conscience to the heart, from public mores and dictums to individual experience and choice. I inevitably suggested to Farah “Between a Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience” as the subtitle for my book. For Twain, as for any great novelist, reality was the clay waiting to be shaped. There was a collusion, not a collision, between fiction and reality, and that collusion functioned as antidote to the lies, illusions and fantasies that our monitoring conscience imposes on us. To me, this was the best argument against those who consider fiction irrelevant.

Farah was intrigued by the idea and against the subtitle. “Too academic,” she said. “By which I mean too abstract.” Which was basically the same reaction I got from my real editor.

Afterwards, I took Farah to a room where mainly the pictures by African American painters were housed. I wanted her to see the series painted by Jacob Lawrence on the migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between the First and Second World Wars. Lawrence had said, “To me, migration means movement. There was conflict and struggle. But out of the struggle came a kind of power and even beauty.”

Huckleberry Finn
was the first book I taught when I went back to Iran in 1979 and accepted a position in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Tehran. So at a time when our leaders were denouncing America to charmed throngs as an imperialist Satan, I found myself struggling to define America, with its complexities and paradoxes, for my restless students through the eyes of its fiction. I had come to believe that American fiction was at once its moral guardian and its best critic. In Iran in those days, as the revolution raged all over the city and on campus, it was easy to feel orphaned in your own home, and most of my students immediately connected to the two homeless refugees, Huck and Jim. The first thing a totalitarian mind-set does is strip its citizens of their sense of identity, rewriting their past to suit its goals, and rewriting history to serve its ends. Already my students understood that Huck’s defiance took courage, that it was not always easy to turn your back on what everyone else was doing, however morally repugnant it might seem. The course, simply called “Research,” its description as vague as its title, was a huge undergraduate class designed to help students do just that: research. I was told that I should teach the different stages of writing a research paper. “Why don’t you choose a typical American novel,” the head of the English department recommended. “Americans are in such vogue these days.” He himself was a Hemingway man, an extremely popular teacher who was also in vogue—for all the wrong reasons, of course, seeing how almost every day there was some call or demonstration against American imperialists and their domestic lackeys. Just three months after that conversation, no one but a few eccentrics like he and I would think of America in terms of Hemingway or Twain. The Americans everyone was talking about were the hostages held in the embassy, which happened to be situated not far from the university.